Following His Joy: Set Me Free from Anxiety

By Tiffany Paolini Anderson

Many people fight the battle called anxiety, and overcoming it may seem like an unsurmountable struggle. In Following His Joy, author Tiffany Anderson provides a personal account of complete healing from postpartum, panic disorder, depression, and anxiety. She shares how she was helped by modern medicine, traditional counseling, and her faith in God. This memoir tells how she successfully transitioned to a lifestyle of God care, self-care, and other care to allow her to be a joyful wife and mother.

Praise for Following His Joy

“Tiffany unabashedly journals her horrific seasons of suffering with anxiety in a way that can connect with so many other anxiety-sufferers. The good news is how God brought Tiffany’s seasons of suffering to a close. She shares with her readers the edifying and encouraging key to her overcoming experience.”

—Judy Rossi, author, Enhancing Your Marriage, Raising Responsive Children, and Naked and Unashamed

“Following His Joy is an honest reality of what most of us are walking in. Her truthful storytelling and core wisdom is like a breath of fresh air. This transformational book belongs in your equipping arsenal. Her inspiring hope will stick to the walls of my heart.”

—Chelsea Wojcik, author,
Bible Journaling with Kids, The Traveling Wise Me

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664244474

Tiffany Paolini Anderson

Tiffany Paolini Anderson is a mother of four children, one of whom miscarried early to heaven. She teaches, speaks, and presents a testimony to the power of God. Anderson lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, Ken, and their three sons.

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Copyright © 2021 Tiffany Paolini Anderson.

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-4448-1 (sc)

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WestBow Press rev. date: 11/11/2021

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to Ken, my husband,

who wooed me into our shared forever love

for our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

Contents

Introduction

His Courtship

His Love

His Timing

His Forgiveness

His Word

His Face

His Leading

His Goodness

His Calling

His Presence

Our Prayer

Our Move

Our Loss

Our Hope

Our Truth

Our Break

Our Belief

Our Miracle

Our Arrival

Our Home

Our Family

Our Joy

Your Story Here

Introduction

As I lie here and type, a heating pad dressed in a pink cupcake sweater warms my weary bones. I’m twelve days past the onset of my first novel coronavirus symptom. The first day was the start of my menstrual cycle, so wanting a nap wasn’t out of the ordinary. Waking to a low-grade fever was. In an instant, I realized, I have to get tested. That dreaded up your nose and into your brain swab would have to take place. My encouraging husband reminded me it could be anything. Yes, but I had had the flu vaccine, and it had been a season, really a year, where whenever something else went array, we shrugged it off and marched forward with a sigh, saying, Because of 2020.

I was tested on the first day of December and sent home to wait in quarantine, just to be safe. I’d never heard that saying so often in all my life: just to be safe. It was like that of a parent holding a child’s hand to cross the street. Now it’s almost a new way of greeting someone. Bye, and stay safe! Socially distanced. Mask wearing. All very abnormal terms turned into nomenclature. So just to be safe, I had to make the hardest call: alert my aging parents, who had risked visiting over Thanksgiving from out west, that I may have been carrying the very virus we had tried so hard to protect them from. All we could do was sit and wait—and my waiting would have to be done in one of isolation from my immediate family, including our puppy. It was not the sort of first twelve days of Christmas I’d imagined spending with our three young boys. But these body-doubling joint pains are now the remnants of what’s left from a rollercoaster of symptoms.

Honestly, to some degree, all parents could use a bedside staycation, where they have all their parenting power relinquished for a day—or ten. Sure, some of it has been light and fun, like hearing our youngest holler at our oversized puppy, Scooter, stop eating the house. Some were more painful, as I overheard that same youngster’s thump in the room next door as he slipped off a stair from his brother’s bunk bed and broke his right arm. The only thing that held me back from storming out of my isolation room to comfort our baby were the immediate thoughts of why I was in that room to begin with. My exiting meant more exposure to possibly make him sicker. So I sat and listened as his older brothers and my husband came to the rescue. I made calls to help begin the urgent care visit for our preschooler, who was also in quarantine, just to be safe. In between these more hopeless days, it would be the outpouring of a community, even a virtual one, which would begin to refocus and restore our attention to what matters most this time of year: love in the coming of a baby in a manger, and how we felt that love. We received it in meals, calls, magazines, Lysol, toilet paper, cookies, cross-country care kits, and all of the mixed bags that this year has wrapped up to be. Hope was restored in our oldest playing Father Christmas to his younger brothers as he picked up on our Christmastime traditions, as well as the reading of The Traveling Wise Men by my sweet friend Chelsea Wojcik. Hope was refreshed in the neighbor’s drop-off of cookie dough to host a virtual extravaganza baking session with our boys. Hope became a conviction as my isolation brought another ten thousand words to you in this book.

So where could I have possibly picked up this novel virus? Who knows? Was it in the passing of our unknowingly and later confirmed COVID-19 positive school staff, though we both wore masks and were outdoors? Was it from one of our sons who could have been asymptomatic, because the youngest cleans public windows with his tongue? Or was it the time I didn’t use my hand sanitizer right after getting our groceries? I will never know. I simply know that my tough yet milder symptoms were a small price to pay. Although I lost my taste and smell from the virus meandering into my brain, so many others lost loved ones in its severe attack.

And like this more novel virus, there are diseases that attack so many of us in silent numbers. I get to type today, more than three months of being off my antidepressants, for no other reason than that of hope being restored to me. And that same hope is my story to share with you here: the hope that anxiety, panic, postpartum, depression, or any other attack you’re battling will not have the last word.

So why have you picked up this book? I may never know. But the one who made this message out of my mess does. God knows. This is His book through our journey. My hope is that yours will also be restored and that whatever message you’ve heard up until now of not overcoming, whether decades or days in your struggle, will be met with the all-knowing power of our very real God and Jesus Christ. I hope that He will enter your space as you read what He has shared in my mess and find a new message for the story you’re writing right now.

But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9–10 NIV)

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His Courtship

Spring 2001

Turning to Hollywood’s leading ladies for a sense of life’s direction was the beginning of my misplaced security as an only child and first-generation American from Argentine folks. I used to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as my nightly routine from the wee age of seven. By my tweens, Father of the Bride would take over my nightly pre-dream preparations. My community college days (rather nights) showcased My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Yes, this eighties child made it her mission to live with these as her life truths. This would most definitely influence my black-haired roots turning blonde streaked in high school.

It was only in dating my now husband, Ken, who invited me to his church on our second date, that I would begin to form my new and true identity. He was (and still very much is) good-looking enough for me to accept this godly date and erase any born again preconceptions I had of him. It would not be long after that when I found myself in a pew without him. After quickly becoming a Sunday school teacher, student of whatever the Methodist Church had to offer, and joining all prayer groups, I had become what I had feared in him: a born-again Christian.

Something, or someone, was still missing. So let me start at the beginning—that is, at the beginning of how this flame was first lit. It was my very own Hollywood or Broadway show. Enter center stage: